Why Ruby?

[loser]

Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:

> On 12/19/10 11:54 AM, foobar wrote:
> > Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:
> >
> >>> Either way, I personally don't care that much for another syntax for delegates. I personally just want to see this ugly hack removed from the standard library and discouraged. This feature promotes a code smell. And for what, as you said yourself, to save 4 characters?
> >>
> >> "a>  b" vs. (a, b) { return a>  b; }
> >>
> >> Savings: 17 characters.
> >>
> >
> > I reserve the right to dislike it even if it was 20 characters. The fact that it's a useful hack doesn't make it smell less.
> 
> It doesn't smell. You believe it does only because you mistakenly 
> believe it's not hygienic.
> 
> >>> D should be consistent with only ONE delegate syntax. This is why Ruby reads like poetry to its followers and c++ is like carving letters in stone.
> >>
> >> Also, Ruby is well slower than C++ and other languages. It's easy to
> >> design a beautiful language if that's the primary concern. It's
> >> difficult to design a language when you want to keep in harmony a larger
> >> list of desiderata.
> >>
> >>> I much prefer that the lowering you mentioned to be implemented so that performance wise this UGLY hack will have no benefits.
> >>
> >> The lowering will unfortunately solve little. I don't see how
> >>
> >> sort!"a>  b"(array);
> >>
> >> is horrible but
> >>
> >> sort(a, b; array) { return a>  b; }
> >
> > I wasn't referring to the above which still deals with the syntactic issue.
> > I'm talking about making:
> >
> > sort!"a>b"(whatever);
> > and
> > sort(whatever, (a, b) { return a>b; });
> >
> > have the same performance. Thus obviating the need for the first form.
> 
> I explained how this is much more difficult than it might seem at first 
> sight.

Your only argument was that it's more difficult because it's more difficult and even the great lisp gods won't do that. Listen, we see through your bluff. Do I need to list you the names of 10 functional language compilers that actually do this optimization. It might even be the case that LDC optimizes this unlike DMD.